FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-start-demanding-substack
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congressional-testimony-the-leading
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV0GSIT4QiE GovCorp hearing on how
they will extend your slavery


Congress, In Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor The Internet
Even More Aggressively: Greenwald

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee
along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly
demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms
and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing
— convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep.
Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees,
Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most
stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to
commandeer the control which these companies wield over political
discourse for their own political interests and purposes.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and
Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testify before the House Energy and
Commerce Committee, Mar. 25, 2021

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this
hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the
U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to
appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce
them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of
Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after
the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg,
Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have
failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological
content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful,
accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible
revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force
compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications
Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content
posted by their users).

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite
concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing
conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda
(that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online
censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring
generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the
right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans
insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete,
since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral
transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats
in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of
protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather
than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke
like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to
please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically
issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive
“content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by
contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for
vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front
of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to
hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to
demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don't
think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don't think the
government should be either.”

Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way
human beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed
by a team of public speaking consultants that it is customary to
address members of the Committee as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.”
He thus began literally every answer he gave — even in rapid back and
forth questions — with that word. He just refused to move his mouth
without doing that — for five hours (though, in fairness, the
questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and unreasonable). His
brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no matter how
appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for several
seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place in
the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back,
uttered the word “Congressman” or “Congresswoman,” stopped for several
more seconds to search for the next applicable spot in the
spine-cassette, and then proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words
slowly transmitted into his neurons. One could practically see the
gears in his head painfully churning as the cassette rewound or
fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely consumed roughly thirty
percent of the hearing time. I’ve never seen members of Congress from
across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by visceral
contempt for Zuckerberg’s non-human comportment:

But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like
this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed
to political leaders successfully demanding that social media
companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall
that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the
country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores
and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very
prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last
pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA)
explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these
companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat
after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the
internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher
(D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that
the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem
to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech
companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and
remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and
Al Qaeda.

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is:
watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of
political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I
detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that
the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when
they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical
goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted.

There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power.
Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition,
which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long
urged the need to prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation
pending in Congress with bipartisan support (including in the House
Antitrust Subcommittee before which I testified several weeks ago)
that would make meaningful and productive strides toward diluting the
unaccountable and undemocratic power these monopolies wield over our
political and cultural lives. If these hearings were about
substantively considering those antitrust measures, they would be
meritorious.

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these
hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain
Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power
to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the
Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic
politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their
liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any
places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty
wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the
“unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app
Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they dislike
removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its
front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on
Google-enabled podcasts:
New York Times front page, Mar. 26, 2021

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive
regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and
people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a
“free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from
doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened
in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.